Category Archives: Writing

Dropping in to say hello, world. To let you know I’m well. And that the writing goes well, too. Most days.

There are lesser days, though, when nothing goes right, when I erase more than I write, and wonder why I think I can deliver this story. On those days, I’m not so well. Because the well runs dry.

Have you ever wondered how authors of other centuries wrote such beautiful stories with paper and quill and ink wells?

Writing should be easier today. Thanks to digital keystrokes. And tools like cut and paste. And no messy carbons. And no need to blot.

But no. It’s not easy. No, it’s not.

Not. Notty. Knotty. Now, there’s a word. There’s so much story in my memory that, too often, it becomes KNOTTY. I don’t know which thread to pull, first. I pull one. Then, put it back. Another. Nope. Not than one, either. God help me untangle the nots.

I’m learning to back away on ‘lesser’ days. To leave the blank screen and go outside for fresh air. What is it about a blank screen that causes words to die? And what is about being outside in the garden that invites words to come? Complete sentences, mind you. One pretty line after another. Ones I’ve never thought before. Ones that feel so right I rush back in to preserve them. Lest I forget.

My ghostly grandfather, who plays a prominent role in ‘my’ story, must be worried about something. He’s been dropping into my dreams the last two weeks. A few nights ago, he told me I needed to season the story a little. Then, handing me what looked like an ordinary salt shaker — he told me to “just shake some of “this” on it.” That “it” would help my stories sort themselves out. “Just like cream rinse helps tangled hair.”

It wasn’t my intention to fast from the blog for a month, though a few weeks ago, I did decide to skinny-down life to better prepare for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

It wasn’t difficult. One early in May morning I woke up and drew a few lines in the sand to make my sandbox a little smaller. Inside was everyday life and my father’s story. Outside the box was everything else — including my beloved home and garden restoration projects — no matter how many fabulous mid-summer plant sales that are bound to come up to tempt.

It’s a case of doing first things first. Focusing on what I would be most sad to leave undone in this world, in the event I die sooner than later. Because who would write Dad’s story if not me? Who knows it or cares to know it in its scattered and torn state? Who would give it their all and then some? And really now — as much as I adore home restoration projects, none of them have quite made my heart sing like working on my father’s and aunt’s childhood story.

The fast month of May taught me much. Not only my growing knowledge of my young father and aunt and their life — but much about me and my life — why the more I cozy up to my young father, the more I see how Mother was right, when she’d so often say, by way of explanation to others — was it with a slight disparaging note? — yes, I think so: ” Well. What can you expect? … She’s just like her father.” Today I respond by saying this state of ‘two peas in a pod’ being, between Dad and I, may become my trump card to taking on this most seemingly impossible task of my life.

So between now and mid-July, I’ve advance work to finish and submit — partly because it’s assigned and partly because I wish to get the most I can from this writing experience my husband is giving me. And though I don’t intend to absent myself from the blog the entire month of June — I’m here today, aren’t I? — I just wanted you to know what’s up in my not so everyday life at the moment — in case you’re interested.

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Ten years ago, I asked God to give me a story. As prayer goes, it was childlike: Short in words — tall in dreams. And as best as I can now recall, it went something like this: God, if you give me a story to write, I promise to write it.”

I’m not sure Dad’s story is IT but I think it is. Because it would be just the kind of answer to prayer that would fit a Godly sense of humor — since the story has been as close as my father’s hip pocket all my life. I only wish I’d realized it sooner. I wish I’d realized it before Daddy lost his voice to tell it. But since wishes don’t always rise to the level of prayer in my life, here’s praying I can become Daddy’s voice. One more time. Because life goes fast and some stories were lived to last longer than a lifetime.

Three-quarters to the end of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, I’m thinking I’ve missed the boat A LITTLE. You know, the one sailing strong on the “smoke and mirrors” theme of truth, the very one dropping anchors of reality in earlier readings.

Why, not so far away in Book One, I recall underlining this passage — only to ignore it in my March write-up:

“True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me. Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us. True was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman’s finger pointed in the picture on my wall while the young Raleigh listened to his tales…I measure truth against those early things: Is this how Mary would have told it?” (p. 87*)

Then somewhere in Book Two, I underlined this passage — which again, by the end of April, failed to make press in April’s write-up:

“”What is truth?” I waxed rhetorical, “What is sanity” Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept…that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe that we only see dimly through that dream web, which is Maya. Maya.”” (p. 242)

Now comes May’s write-up. And no longer can I ignore the undercurrent of truth versus illusion — the ability of one — any one of us and any of Rushdie’s characters — to discern in total, the falseness and reality of things. I can’t ignore it because it’s EVERYWHERE. As big and bright as a billboard advertising Kolynos Toothpaste, in fact. And to put the cart before the horse — and why not, since Rushdie is fond of doing the same? — is this wonderful observation on truth and false toward the end of this month’s reading:

…in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence — that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.” (p. 373)

So much happens in the second half of Book Two. Dominoes fall. One event crashing into another until little is left standing. All because characters — and Saleem, in particular, who sees himself on center stage — can’t help but reach false conclusions to perceived smidgens of truth — and act accordingly to destructive results.

First, Saleem’s three exiles: the first from his changeling family, the second from India and another from his rich inner world of the children of midnight — the latter, because of a nose job that results in shutting down his inner airwaves but offers in return the power of “sniffing-out-the-truths” (p. 352) in his exterior world.

Second, there is death — death of characters and, as a result, death of familiar ways of living. Too many bodies to count except to say that there is plenty of room on board for the re-appearance of Shiva and Parvarti-the-Witch and whatever other children of midnight might wish to visit in Book Three.

Then, there is rebirth and transformation: Of love between Saleem’s changeling parents and of a shameful true-false love Saleem feels for his sister, the Brass Monkey — who, surprisingly, becomes not only tame and malleable while living in Pakistan, but an overnight singing sensation known as Jamila Singer. Perhaps, most intriguing, is a rebirth of a protective sheet, with one small hole cut in the center — the one used to shield Jamila the Brass Monkey from her adoring public reminds us of another in Book One which shielded Saleem’s “grandmother” from the eyes of her future husband. And really, how can anyone get a sense of the whole truth — of a person place or thing — when peering through a small hole of a sheet?

As usual, I’ve left much unsaid — because, as usual, there’s just too much in Rushdie’s fictional world to point a finger at. But not so ‘as usual’ is this: that unlike the previous two, this third section of reading was tough going. Not because it’s not beautifully told. Or that the pace wasn’t good. Or that the characters had lost their power to charm me. No, if anything, I found myself caring more about what happens to Saleem and his family, as I followed their movements to deal with loose “truths” that have slithered across chapters like a serpent to poison relationships and destroy worlds.

No, the reasons are more difficult to explain. Maybe because some great truth is slithering off the page to become personal. Maybe I feel snake-bit. For like Saleem and company, I realize my bit knowledge of Truth — the one I can see through a small hole in a symbolic perforated sheet — can only help me get at truth but not quite nail it. Suffice it to say that the truth I’ve witnessed unfurl in Rushdie’s story is greater than any one character has yet realized. And that it’s this fuller truth I’ve found exploding off the page into my own life.

If these characters can do and think such horrible deeds in the name of ‘truth’ — small case ‘t’ — and be so terribly mistaken in their one-sided judgments and self-righteousness — then what about me and my own small world? What about any of us? Can we be so different?

Unless of course, I’ve got it all wrong. Yes. Perhaps I’ve stayed with Rushdie in India too long. For I, too, could be “obsessed with correspondence;” of finding “similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things… looking for meaning” revealed “only in flashes.” (p. 344)

Perhaps better minds than mine know where Rushide’s boat is heading. But wherever it docks, I’ve come to accept it will take me a little longer to get there. I’m lagging behind. Passing time and words on the slow boat to China.

Note: All page references relate to 2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition. For other viewpoints, please follow the link to other reactions of those participating in the read-along.